On Fri, 20 May 2005, John D. Burger wrote:
I find all these statements about the near-uselessness of NUMERIC^NUMERIC to be pretty amazing. It's fine to say, "no one seems to be asking for this, so we haven't implemented it yet", but, c'mon, folks, Postgres gets used for more than "business cases".
If people don't see the use of a function they aren't going to implement it. In addition, there is a small, but non-zero cost to adding a function/operator to the system (in the cost to maintain it at the very least) and if the general belief is that the function or operator is useless or nearly useless then it simply may not be worth adding.
It's not only useless, it's dangerous. As fas as I know, numeric _guarantees_ the result of a operation to be correct to the last digit.
This is _impossible_ to archive in the general case (thing 2^(1/2)) - and therefor, there should be no pow(numeric, numeric). There should be a pow(numeric, int), and maybe a pow(numeric, float) - and certainly
there should be (and is) an pow(float, float) - but pow(numeric, numeric) defeats the whole purpose of the numeric type.
greetings, Florian Pflug
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